


Run Baby

by highkey



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Hurt Clint, M/M, Poor Bruce
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-20 14:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2432312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/highkey/pseuds/highkey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce was working in his lab, Clint keeping him company. Fast forward a couple of hours and Clint is sitting on the floor, surrounded by rubble, waiting for his phone to ring, and Bruce is heaven knows where.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run Baby

He waited by the phone. There was really nothing else to do. Rationality nagged at him and he thought of taking a shower, of eating, of going back to sleep, he thought of maybe, probably, most definitely making a call to S.H.I.E.L.D., getting to a hospital or a med bay and getting checked out. But he didn’t. He just sat on the floor, a little undistinguishable from the mess of rubble, fallen beams and pieces of wall and lab equipment that surrounded him, and waited by the phone.

Clint looked ahead at the clock that now hung above a gaping hole in one of the walls, and thought _that_ clock, the clock Kate had bought for him as a going away present because it ‘was prettiest shade of purple she had ever had the good fortune to witness’, had to be the toughest clock ever made to still be hanging about and still ticking like that. He almost laughed. ‘O say does that purple clock tiiiiiiick, O’er labs of the-’ Lucky barked thankfully pulling him away from that train of thought.

The minute hand moved and it was 3:59am. He started counting. 57…58…59...he waited, holding his breath, willing every single sound within earshot to stop, stop for just this minute, please.

He waited another minute before he exhaled, somehow finding a way to sink even deeper on the floor. Nothing again. He sighed, a feeling of disappointment settling over him, and decided on sparing a few seconds to give in to his nagging rationality to note his injuries.  It would be real unfortunate if he missed the call because he was too busy dying right then.

There was a high pitch ringing in his ears and he felt a pressure in his head and he knew he most likely had a concussion.  Two, maybe three, broken ribs, cracked fibia, left clavicle, right ulna…Clint _hurt_. But he was the archer from the Avengers. The one who ran around with a stick and a string from the paleolithic era, who jumped off buildings, fought bad guys both human and alien, the one who sparred with Captain America, sparred with the fucking **Black Widow** every other day so it was all a sort of familiar hurt and so he did nothing to ease the pain. He figured healing and not being in agony could wait a bit and continued on what he had been doing for the past 3 hours. Clint waited by the phone.

On the floor, leaning back on the lab table behind him, in the one story apartment he was staying in with Bruce, in the lab Bruce had holed himself in hours ago, he was miserable.

He looked around the room, mentally exhausted from just staring alternately between his phone and the clock.  His eyes ghosted over various pieces of paper on the ground all around him containing Bruce’s sketches of various scientific formulas and equations Clint couldn’t guess the purpose of if given a thousand tries. He wished he had the strength to clean up a little, as if picking the up the place plaster by plaster would somehow erase the last 3 hours.

Lucky lay beside him, his head resting on Clint’s lap, licking and whining at the swell on Clint’s inner arm, maybe knowing the break within was the result of Clint protecting him.

He waited by the phone for another hour, holding his breath again when 4:59:59 rolled around and cursing any sound that passed between 5:00 and 5:01, before he really looked at it and noticed the web of cracked glass lines that littered the screen. He quickly grabbed at it, a slew of “no, no, no, no, please, no” spilling from his lips, pushing frantically with a sort of madness at the power button, but the phone remained a black that only showed his reflection.

 “Aw, phone no,” he threw it across the room with a grunt, Lucky jolting away from him, letting out a squeak of surprise. “Clint, you dummy.”

All that time, 4 _fucking_ hours now of sitting on his ass and staring at the phone and his phone had been broken. _Dummy._  He started to get up quickly then oh so slowly when some of the bones in his body, most of his muscles, protested.  His brain protested, Lucky barked at him and Clint knew even he protested.

But Bruce was out there somewhere, probably had been trying to call him for hours on the hulk out proof phone Tony had made him. He might be scared, most definitely naked and vulnerable and exhausted as he usually was after de-hulking, alone and most likely in need of Clint. _Dummy_!

He managed to get up on his feet, figuring out a way to walk in a way that caused him the least amount of pain, and he made his way, over glass and a cacophony of Bruce’s tools, down the long hall from Bruce’s lab to the living room. He bent down to pick up his favorite purple hoodie, balancing on his better leg as he crouched down to pick it up and grimacing as he contorted his broken body into it,  and then walked oh    so    slowly  out of the apartment, Lucky followed closely beside him.

Clint limped down the street, a number of times almost tripping over Lucky who was trotting along  pressing himself against Clint’s legs,  to the a little tea shop Bruce had frequented over the past couple of weeks in times when he needed a calm Clint couldn’t give him. When whatever he had been doing down in the lab got to him and he needed to de-stress.

Clint dipped into the side portion of the shop where people could sit under a veranda and walked a ways to a payphone that hung next to the shops side door. He sank down on the wall next to the phone, wincing as he did, and Clint waited. In pain, a headache pounding against his skull and Lucky pressed into his sore ribs, he waited.

3596…3597…3598…3599…

He held his breath. Lucky stopped his panting and closed his mouth. The night held its quiet around him as everything slept and Clint couldn’t have been more thankful if he tried.

The payphone rang.

His head shot up to the phone at the sound. It rang again.

He slowly, in the quickest way he could manage, got up from the ground using his hand against the brick wall behind him to support himself. With a slight tremble in his hand, he removed the phone from the hook and pressed it against his ear.

“Mr. Wizard?” Bruce? Clint’s voice shook. Please be Bruce.

“Baby Bird? Clint? Clint.” The name came out of the other end like a relieved sigh. Like Clint’s name was a Hail Mary and if Bruce said it enough times he could be forgiven for every single transgression he’d ever committed in his life.

“Bruce!” Clint let out all his held in worries in a breath of relief, a crooked grin threatening to split Clint’s face in two.  Clint leaned back against the wall for leverage, needing something to hold up his body as the deep anxiety lifted from him. He let out a nervous laugh, “Where are you?”

No answer came from Bruce for a few seconds, seconds that felt like at least 3 lifetimes to Clint. Bruce was alright, Bruce was okay. But Bruce was somewhere away from him and that made Clint not alright and not okay.

“Did I…did _it_ cause a lot of trouble this time?”

Clint looked around himself, at the still standing buildings, at the few people walking about and on with their nightly lives, everything and everyone unaware to the fact that the Hulk had visited them only a handful of hours ago. He looked around at the lack of police or ambulance sirens, at the lack of anything related to S.H.I.E.L.D. Clint looked around and took in all the trouble-less-ness that was all around him.

He then lifted up his right arm and hissed in pain, gritting his teeth and turning away from the phone so Bruce wouldn’t hear. He looked up the side of the street at the part of the road that was lit up with the now rising sun and he could probably play Hansel and Gretel back to the apartment with the splotches of his blood that trailed him.

Clint straightened himself off the wall and onto his left foot and instantly regretted it. The ringing in his ears hadn’t stopped or quieted in any way and the pressure against his skull hadn’t lifted. His chest ached, pulling the neck of his hoodie forward he could see a dark bruise blossoming beneath his shirt, and breathing was becoming more and more of a chore as he went on. Clint _hurt_.

He looked down at Lucky. Lucky, who with the blow that Clint had protected him from, could’ve been seriously injured if not worse.  Clint thought of the days when Lucky became his. Remembered the tracksuit mafia, remembered how frantic he had been in making sure Lucky, _fix my damn dog_ , had been alright and doesn’t want to imagine going through all of that again. Seeing Lucky hurt again.

But Lucky wasn’t hurt.  And Clint was not so okay right this second, but as soon as he got Bruce back to his side, he would be.

“Could’ve been worse…” And it truly could have been. If Bruce hulked out and the only things to get damaged were some crummy apartment and Clint himself, then it very well wasn’t worth any guilt on Bruce’s part. No one died, and Clint was sure that the building was probably going to be demolished as soon as they went back home to Brooklyn anyway.  As it was, Dayton, Ohio wasn’t leveled, Clint would be good as new(ish) given a couple of weeks and no one was any the wiser to the Hulks appearance. It could have been so much worse. Clint asked again, “Where are you?”

“You sound weird. Are you sure everything’s fine?”

Clint straightened himself as if Bruce could see him and tried to regulate his breathing so he could speak without sounding something akin to a longtime chain smoker. “Yeah, sure, everything’s fi-“

“The Other Guy took it out on you.”

 It wasn’t a question. A simple statement that voiced something Bruce had been dreading, something Bruce had worried and obsessed about since even before they started seeing each other.

Clint’s gut lurched and twisted and a panic started to consume him. Bruce liked to run away. And Bruce was really good at running. He desperately asked again, the phone in his hand in a death grip, “Bruce, please, where are you?”

There was another silence from Bruce.

“Bruce?”

“I-I don’t know” On the other end of the line, Bruce looked around at his surroundings. Looked at the familiarity of it all. It was a place he had been before. A long time ago. “I have no idea,” he lied, “I just woke up in the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s okay, I’m gonna find you. I’m gonna come and get you, okay, Bruce? I’m coming.”

“Clint-”

“I’ve been through worse,” Clint was shaking all over.  “Don’t worry about it, okay? I’m-”

“Maybe you shouldn’t come and get me.”

“Bruce, that’s not an option.” No one spoke for a while, for what felt like 3 more lifetimes to Clint.

Bruce’s voice came through the phone after a minute, soft and defeated.  “You know, I look at Steve sometimes and I hate him.”  Bruce murmured, “The super solider serum enhanced what he already was, a hero. It turned me into a monster. What does that say about me?”

“Bruce, you're not a monster. Neither is Jade Jaws," Bruce cringed at the pet name, "You _are_ a hero. Whether you're dorky, cute, smart Dr. Bruce Banner and you're helping people by using your big brain, or you're big, angry, green Hulk and you're helping people through the power of smashing, you're a hero.”

“The Other Guy-“

“Is a part of you…Bruce, what happened was an accident, he didn’t mean to-“

“But he did.”

“Bruce, _please_.” Bruce had never heard a please sound so bare, so blatantly and unmistakably desperate, he could almost hear the lump in Clint’s throat. He hated this. This ugly thing he was having to do now.  He wanted so badly for the past couple of hours to just erase themselves. Wished so fiercely that he could be right this second in bed sleeping with Clint in his arms instead of sitting on the porch steps of a long abandoned house he’d vowed never to return to again. He **hated** this ugly thing he was having to do now, but the only way he saw to make sure Clint didn’t get hurt was to hurt him. He hated this. He hated himself. He hated The Other Guy so much that the hate felt like a physical weight that threatened to crush him.

“Don’t come and get me.”  It hurt him in a physical way saying that again.

Bruce imagined sitting where he was and doing nothing but waiting….and waiting. He fantasized about hearing a car pull down the stretch of what once could be called a driveway ahead of him, imagined Clint stepping out of it. Bruce wanted for Clint to find him and wanted so badly for them to run toward each other and embrace and to spin Clint around in his arms. He wanted, with every fiber of his being, for that wonderfully clichéd moment in his head of his love finding him and everything being slow motion and happy tears.

But even if all that happened, if he allowed Clint to find him, Clint would pull up into the driveway and would, in all likelihood, stumble out of the car on a broken leg and most likely limp to him. Bruce wouldn’t be able to hold Clint, or spin him around, or really have any physical contact with him in any small way because he’d be too afraid of touching him in the wrong place and hurting him further.  Would fear too much of breaking Clint any more than The Other Guy already had.

The Other Guy.

Bruce really wanted to see Clint. Needed to see all the damage his selfishness had caused the other man. Needed to know what exactly the Hulk broke, what the Hulk bruised and shattered.  Needed to know every little detail of every little pain Clint was feeling because of the monster within him.

It was a longing, wanting to see Clint, and he realized it was mainly because he was so physically, so mentally and psychologically drained. He was completely and thoroughly exhausted and he was in need of fuel and nothing had, in recent years, fueled him more than the ever present rage he felt towards the beast inside him. The big, green rage monster that wouldn’t stop taking and taking from him. Never stopping in its rampage to destroy-

Bruce’s vision went a shade green and he took a deep inhale, abandoning his thoughts, clearing his head into a blank slate.

Clint wasn’t safe around him. He never had been and Bruce didn’t know why he ever thought this all could work out.

“Bruce, I’m com-“

The line went dead.

Clint felt like dying when he heard the dial tone. He’d been so close to the edge of death so many times in his life but he would gladly, without a doubt, go through all those little deaths to never feel the way he did right then ever again. He wanted to cry. The pit in his stomach hollowed even more and the weariness and anxiety that had lifted from him when he had heard Bruce’s voice enveloped him and Clint felt so heavy he really just wanted to cry. He took a shuddering breath and the lump in his throat gave way to a sob that wracked his whole body, causing him even more pain at the involuntary movements.

As he cried, leaning his forehead on the payphone, he thought of the past few hours that led to this moment. He thought of the past few years that consisted of so much happiness, the past few years of Bruce being in his life, of being a team, of completely understanding each other fully and not at all. He thought of the late nights of stitching lacerations and patching up bruises after saving the world when they were hurt but not badly enough to warrant a stay at the S.H.I.E.L.D. med bay.

 He thought of all the time spent on their couch back in Brooklyn watching TV together, thought of all the lighthearted fights and not so lighthearted fights they’d had over the years. Thought about all the amazing days of loving each other completely, openly, and the equally amazing days of hating each other just the tiniest bit.

The hate days had always been Clint’s favorites.  Well, they were really more like hate minutes. Minutes when external frustrations got to the better of them both, reaching a point where they blew up at the other person. Petty fights would ensue, but they were quick to turn into ‘I’m sorry I got mad at you 2 minutes ago, here are all the reasons I love you now please ponder over accepting my apology while I pleasure you with my mouth’.

Clint loved the lazy days when he wasn’t training and Bruce was away from his lab and they would order pizza and marathon Dog Cops, loved them with all his heart, but those stupid fights that ended in lists of various reasons to love a human being had to take the cake.

Standing there crying, still holding the payphone to his ear as the dawn broke all around him, Clint hated Bruce the tiniest bit. It tore him apart thinking, knowing, this wasn’t going to be something that was felt for 2 minutes and then released through expressions of love. Bruce didn’t want to come back to him.

Clint reflected over the series of events that brought together the mild mannered scientist and the dummy, brought together the monster and the archer, and a sob shook him. Lucky let out a whine, pressed himself against Clint, and rubbed his head against Clint’s leg, doing everything he could do to comfort his friend.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was in my head for a while and I HAD to get it out. Writing it down was quick, but hopefully not quick enough to be too poorly done. Inspired by an accidental hulk-out fic i read sometime last year, [this](http://sixsmithyouass.tumblr.com/post/32341429370) gifset and by the amazing work of my favorite gif-er/story teller [begitalarcos](http://begitalarcos.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


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